3 ms·

Adobe has made more things multi-threaded over the years so probably not. ARM has SVE too which I assume is similar to the 'velocity engine'

• addaon 4y ago
  Velocity Engine was a marketing name for Altivec (which was also a marketing name, just IBM's instead of Apple's). Altivec was roughly comparable to Arm's NEON (32 128-bit registers, packed 32-bit float operations making the largest part of the ISA extension), but with a few key differences. Altivec had a much richer set of basic integer operations than neon (VPERM, you were my best friend), but NEON supported packed 64-bit double-precision floats. In general as a developer Altivec was much more fun to work with, and I'd expect that for Photoshop it was probably the more powerful vector ISA as well. SVE is a successor to NEON that, besides supporting flexible vector sizes, reflects another couple decades of learnings about vector ISA design and a few orders of magnitude more available transistors.
  • anthk 4y ago
    Altivec did magic with MPlayer. 720p video on a G4? Totally doable.
    • addaon 4y ago
      Altivec was just fun to work in. Much like writing PPC assembly in general, it felt like a civilized toolbox with a good set of hand tools -- you have your socket wrench of each size (byte, short, int), and you always know what to reach for -- but then it came with just a couple power tools -- vperm and vsel were basically your electric drill and impact wrench, and every once in a while you'd realize that instead of doing a perfectly good job banging out the result with your hand tools you could just finish the damn thing right now with the power tools. And when you could, you ended up code that was shorter, simpler, faster, and easier to write. So rewarding.
      • anthk 4y ago
        GameCube and Wii developers knew lots of tricks for that, sure.
        • addaon 4y ago
          The GameCube/Wii vector ISA instruction was not Altivec, and not very similar. It used 64-bit vectors (packed as two 32 bit floats usually), so half the size of Altivec, NEON, and most of its contemporaries. These packed vector instructions shared the register file with the floating point unit (that is, an FP register could contain either a 64-bit float acted on by a normal floating point instruction or two 32-bit floats acted on by a vector instruction), rather than having a dedicated separate register file like Altivec. And most of the fun instructions had no equivalent.
  • the-rc 4y ago
    Altivec was Motorola's trademark. IBM worked on it, too, and called it VMX, but didn't make chips using it until the 970/G5. Often lost in the noise is that Apple was the most visible, but not the only customer of Motorola's chips (witness all the variants that never made it into a Mac). Of course, Jobs liked to act as if others didn't exist and Motorola was Apple's own CPU department. I wish someone with knowledge would describe how or why IBM decided it was a good idea to sell silicon to him. It did prepare them a bit for the Cell partnership with Sony and Toshiba, but there's probably more to the story than that.